HD Is Not That Hard

On Friday or Saturday I recorded the series premiere of "Masters of Science Fiction." Tonight I tried to watch it.

I failed. It's not my fault.

The opening titles were in 4:3 format. I said, "um, how could this not be in HD?" A few moments later, however, the screen expanded to the full HD 16:9. OK, so ABC or the local affiliate just goofed it up.

There was some music, and then a couple of people started talking. But there were no actual words. I waited to see if it was intentional -- would be weird, but you never know -- but sure enough, no dialogue. The surround channels were coming out the mains as well. So just background noise and music, no dialogue at all.

For the entire first half hour of the show, there were no words. After the commercial break at 30 minutes, they fixed it and it worked at the end. Of course, I scanned back and forth to test it: I wasn't going to sit through the whole thing. I suppose I could have used closed captioning, but I just deleted it.

Great way to start a new series.

I see TV channels breaking HD pictures all the time. I haven't watched it in awhile, but I used to try turning on the local NBC affiliate at about 7:15 a.m. to catch the weather: even though the local affiliate does HD, they would switch the beautiful HD weather maps in the national feed to SD almost as soon as they started, then show the local weather in SD too, then leave it in SD sometimes until the commercial break.

The local CBS affilliate apparently can't put their own local graphics on HD feeds, so sometimes coming back from commercials they show SD to show their graphics, then switch to HD.

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